Not Exactly Living
by runespoor magic
Summary: In which the boy-who-lived is not exactly living, because destiny is a rather complicated thing and he hasn't quite grown into his other titles. My take on the Harry is the Master of Death genre. Repost of a story I previously took down.


_In which the boy-who-lived is not exactly living, because destiny is a rather complicated thing and he hasn't quite grown into his other titles._

…..

If anything went wrong, they blamed the boy in the cupboard.

He had dark blue hair, milky skin riddled with blue veins, and corpse blue lips. His eyes were dark red and shiny and huge in his narrow face. He had a mouthful of very sharp teeth that he never forgot to brush, and he was always very polite.

He lived in the cupboard because he was the resident demon.

He was supposed to make life miserable. Or at least that was what the Dursley's told him.

Instead, he helped with the chores and chatted with the neighbors and caught the mice like a cat with his long black talons. It was all very suspicious, and so they blamed him when things went wrong.

To his credit, the boy took everything in stride. He accepted the blame without ever shedding any light on who the real culprit could be.

He was remarkably polite and even tempered for a demon. If, in fact, he was a demon at all.

"Are you dead?" A thin little girl with bushy hair and blue eyes and buck teeth stood in her shiny dress staring up at the boy. He smiled at her. It was more like a grimace.

"I suppose you could say that."

"Is it boring?"

"A bit."

"Don't you get cold?"

The boy looked surprised. "Er, I hadn't really noticed."

The girl nodded sharply. "Right then. I think you ought to come home with us."

The boy looked at the girl and then back at the house, and then down at his gruesome self. She seemed very determined, and he was not yet in the habit of saying no to people. Death was rather insistent that he should learn, but it was a slow process, and he was used to taking orders. He looked back at the girl. "Alright," he said agreeably.

And so he went to live with the girl and her parents, Dr. and Dr. Granger. They did not seem particularly bothered by his grotesque appearance, or perhaps they hadn't looked at him properly. The boy didn't know. He supposed anything was possible.

"My name is Hermione," the girl said, after a few moments of tense silence in the car.

The boy racked his brain. It had been a while since he'd needed a name. He'd gotten rather used to being the resident demon, really. Boy, freak. No, that wasn't it. He filtered through his mind a bit more. Prongslet? No, that wasn't right. Apprentice? That was what Death called him. No, no, and no. Voldemort? Tom? He thought that rather matched his eyes. But then he remembered that he used to have green eyes, so he supposed that wasn't it at all. "Harry?" he said uncertainly.

Hermione smiled sweetly at him. "That's a nice name."

Harry just smiled a bit. He wasn't used to these kind of pleasantries. They were so…quaint.

Life with the Grangers was slightly more pleasant than life with the Dursley's. They gave him his own room, across the hall from Hermione's, although he wasn't sure why. He didn't require sleep, so the whole thing was rather useless. The bed was too soft and the floor was too open and so sometimes at night he sat in the closet and went into his mindscape to visit Death.

He sat down with a sigh, a deep red arm chair materializing around him, and then a small footstool as he began to stretch out his scrawny legs.

"Apprentice," Death said pleasantly, or as pleasantly as one could with a perpetual scowl on their face.

Harry wiggled his fingers at him. "Hello," he said, because Hermione often used that word when greeting people.

Death looked at him a bit oddly. "Have you completed your destiny yet?" he asked, as he always did. "I'm terribly bored you know, and the days do drag on."

Harry ignored the question. "Have you decided where you will go once I do?"

"I was thinking Hawaii," Death mused. "I've seen some lovely pictures and I imagine the heat must be nice."

Harry nodded along with him. "I suppose so. Has anyone interesting come through lately?"

Death let out a long suffering sigh. "No, never. Lately all of the deaths have been terribly mundane. You've seen how it is."

Harry smiled sympathetically. "Do let me know when the Dursley's come through. I'd like to send them off. I've moved in with a people called the Grangers."

Death drummed his fingers. "Oh, yes, alright. But I do wish you'd hurry up and master the Hallows. I really do think it's about time I've had a vacation."

"I am trying, you know. Are you going to teach me how to master appearances yet?"

Death waved a hand at him dismissively. "Ask me tomorrow. I think I'll take a nap."

Harry just nodded at him and walked out of the mindscape.

When he wasn't visiting Death, he spent the night cleaning the house for the Grangers. It was dull work, terribly boring, but the nights were long, and his efforts usually earned him a pat on the back from one Dr. Granger and a kiss on the cheek from the other.

Hermione suggested that he call them Mum and Dad, to differentiate, but if there was anything he had learned from Death it was that titles were to be taken very seriously, and so he refused.

Life dragged on and Harry fell into a nice routine of visiting Death on alternate nights and cleaning the house on the others. Hermione went to school and the two doctors went to work and Harry read idly and lazed about and practiced his appearances and sharpened his talons.

Everything was going swimmingly, and his destiny was momentarily put on hold. Until Harry and Hermione got their Hogwarts letters on the same day.

A/N I don't own anything. Review please?


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